personal statement for residency application

[Deepa100]

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Hi,
Where can I find out what are the requirements for the personal statement for residency applications (ACGME and AOA)? What length and what they are expecting to see.
Thanks!

 

[cabinbuilder]

Hi,
Where can I find out what are the requirements for the personal statement for residency applications (ACGME and AOA)? What length and what they are expecting to see.
Thanks!

I wrote mine in this format: one page only
Intro about my background
Incident or specific event that made me choose that field
What I hoped to gain from my residency program (i.e for FP I wanted to be able to do it all, be alone in the wilderness, run an ER, be the hospitalist, run urgent care, do clinic medicine, etc) My vision for myself so I would be ready to practice on my own.
My vision for the next ten years, where I saw my career progressing
Conclusion

 

[scotchtapetest]

Hi,
Where can I find out what are the requirements for the personal statement for residency applications (ACGME and AOA)? What length and what they are expecting to see.
Thanks!

There are no requirements except that it has to be less than 28,000 characters in order to be accepted by ERAS (ACGME and AOA).

Having said that, most people recommend that your PS should be about 750 - 1,000 characters (Some would even argue that 1,000 characters is too much). That comes out roughly to 1-1.5 pages.

The goals of PS:
1) Explain why you want a certain specialty/location/whatever.
2) What you want to do with your life.
3) Why/how you would fit in at a given type of program (academic vs community)
4) NOT be a re-statement of your application/CV (they already have that).
5) PERFECT writing (and I mean PERFECT).

Although it happens, VERY rarely anyone gets an interview or it's ranked higher because of their PS BUT often people are denied interviews ranked lower because of their PS (e.g. 1 or more grammar/spelling errors). [Mostly a FMG issue, but still]....

So no matter what your English teacher in high school told you about your creative writing abilities, just make it as conservative and to the point as humanly possible. It should bore people to death to read it and they shouldn't be able to find any mistakes (e.g. written as similar to a congressional bill as possible).

I wrote mine in this format: one page only
Intro about my background
Incident or specific event that made me choose that field
What I hoped to gain from my residency program (i.e for FP I wanted to be able to do it all, be alone in the wilderness, run an ER, be the hospitalist, run urgent care, do clinic medicine, etc) My vision for myself so I would be ready to practice on my own.
My vision for the next ten years, where I saw my career progressing
Conclusion

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